Tears and Joy
by Evaluating Rae
Summary: Post ep to WithinWithout saga. Scully tells her mother of her life as it is now.


Disclaimer: I don't own the X-files. CC and FOX and 1013 and everyone else associated does. I merely a fan who produced her own closure.

This is a request, a post-ep for the Within/Without Saga. It deals with Scully's face-to-face with her mother after leaving that heartbreaking message on her answering machine.

This present is for my gals at Haven. You wanted it so badly you gave me peanut butter. And now I shall repay.

**Tears and Joy**

It has been five days since Scully left a desperate message on her mother's answering machine.

_"I really need to see you."_ she'd said into the static, after the stoic beep. _"I just really need to talk."_

Today, Saturday afternoon, her mother finally returned from San Francisco.

_"Marilyn insisted I come."_ was her explanation, _"If I'd known you needed me Dana, I wouldn't have gone."_

Scully brushed off her mother with an _"I understand", _flagged down her apologizes with a _"No, it's okay." _Attempting to atone herself, Maggie Scully suggested she and her daughter dine out for lunch.

They were going to eat at a quaint dinner. It has a homey ambience frequented by the lonely and heartbroken, though Maggie couldn't know that, she wouldn't have assessed the falling, grief etched faces of costumers with the same broken, facial capillaries and cracked lips her daughter sees in the mirror.

It was the specular reflection of the sorrowed and as Scully pulls her jacket over her shoulders, she stares down, with sad eyes, the indecorous image of herself. Two weeks ago her hair would have been gracefully parted, an auburn scruple of professionalism and her lips, lightly coated with the color of berries.

She can't find the tube of lipstick now.

Her hair is mussed, twisting in waves, and Scully clips it behind her ears. She no longer uses the hair iron or packs concealer in the deep pockets of her work coat. It all seems trite now, pedestrian. Somewhere, hiding in _his_ apartment is dazzling hours of lush lipcolor, lost in the same corner as her avowal of meticulousness. She didn't care anymore, about the prim-and-proper-neatly-packaged government persona, not since she's woken alone, every morning, to empty heart beats and emisis gravidarum.

Scully grips the cold sink, swallows back the morning sickness by clenching her teeth.

How could she explain her situation, her life as it is now, to her mother when she just, two days ago, fully accepted it herself?

_I'm fine Mom, I'm good. Mulder was taken from me and at night, I cry myself to sleep, oh and by the way I'm pregnant, but no really, I'm doing well. How was your trip?_

Dana smirks, inhebriated through dizziness by the absurdity of it. When her fingers begin to ache, she pries them from the porcelain.

In her head, she's voiced it a million times over, always using words like _his baby_ and _our child_ and _I can't believe it myself_. Now that reality's set in, she's apprehensive, daunted to tell her mother the truth. It's not her initial reaction she fears, but the laud and elatedness she's not let herself feel. She doesn't want to celebrate by shopping for booties and Onesies or pick out baby names from a book adorned with nursery colors. To be delighted would betray her solicitude and for a wonderful moment, defeat her anxiety.

She couldn't do that to _him_. She couldn't be excited, happy, overjoyed, when Mulder was God knows where, in God know's what condition. The conjecture sends a sharp twinge through her gut, conjuring bile to threaten her throat and she can't bite it back this time, not when the vision of him alone, naked and screaming her name, makes her lose all control.

* * *

Dana isn't well, Maggie Scully decides, after pulling from the embrace she trapped her daughter in. Over the past eight years, never in their array of scat visits, has she seen her daughter adorned in anything less than forty dollar trousers and an acrylic sweater. 

This Saturday was different.

Today, Dana was bedecked in a baggy jogging uniform. From her unruly tendrils to her worn sneakers, affliction emotes from the youngest female Scully, and her mother feels concern tug at her ribcage.

"Dana, honey, what's wrong?"

Wrinkles of worry age her mother's eyes, creases of beautiful skin fashioned by Dana's fight with a dark, intangible invader years ago. Scully smiles meekly, brushes her mom's shoulder in hopes of smoothing her alarm.

"It's not the cancer, mom."

Scully watches her mother relax, hears her sigh of relief in the words of _"Thank God"._

Backed into the Java Grind's only corner table, Dana lowers herself on the Bordeaux cushioned booth. Her mother sits across from her, her shoulders still tense with a hint of anxiety.

"If it isn't the cancer Dana, what is it? Is it work?"

Maggie Scully tugs on the cross hanging from her neck, an ornament of comfort in a mindset of fear, a subconcious longing for ease. Scully drops her eyes and licks her lips, stinging the chapped skin.

"I um-" she feels it, the head rush of blood, the twinge in her gut and the pins that prick her toes whenever she's brought back to that cold night in Oregon. Heat suffuses the inside of her eyelids, but she doesn't shut them. "Something's happened, mom." she says, her words- if not for the weakness in her voice- matter-of-fact.

"What's happened, sweetheart?"

Whatever resolve she'd conjured up this morning, with her palms pressed to the bathroom floor and her back tight, is lost as Scully lets the pain arrest her.

"It's Mulder, mom." she lets the tears well, fall. "He's gone."

A sharp intake of breath is her mother's only response and Dana buries her eyes behind her thumb and index.

"I lost him." she admits, her chest beginning to shake.

Maggie reaches out her hand, grasps Dana's left in her own.

"How?"

She'd never believe it, never understand, Scully knows, so she drops her shoulders, shakes her head.

"I wasn't there, mom. I couldn't protect him."

She knows it's futile, blaming herself for something beyond her control, but blaming Mulder for not letting her go and Skinner for not trying harder left her stomach with the pungent clench of agony. Moreso than her child.

"I'm so sorry." her mother says, her voice quiet, hardly audible against the melodical tunes of the cafe's speakers. "I know how much Fox meant to you."

This is the last piece, the wooden block that tears down her Jenga tower of stability. Scully's whole face now is buried in her arms, her tears quiet but dampening the polished table. She feels her mother's hands stroking her hair and tries like hell to make it comfort her. It's a pointless attempt.

"Honey, when is the funeral?"

Maggie's surprised when she hears her daughter laugh, watches her lift her head and jab at her swollen eyes.

"He's not dead, mom." she says, though the fear's real, pressing into the back of her cranium like a teasing headache. "He's just...gone."

Uncertain of this new news, Maggie's reaction is a simple "Oh."

"I don't know where he is." Scully admits, wiping tears from her cheeks. "But I'm going to find him, mom." Her words are strong, confident and her shoulders are once again high. "I need to. I have to. There's nothing else I can do."

Her mother nods, tightening her grip on her daughter's hand. It was so familiar, this issuing of comfort for love lost. Her hands stroked sympathy into Fox Mulder's knuckles, eased some small amount of pain from his shoulders when he'd given her the same speech about the woman sitting here, in front of her.

"All of those days we spent searching for you Dana, Fox never gave up. Not even when I did." She smiles at her daughter, softly. "I have no doubt you don't have the same determination to get him back, to have him home."

Somehow, this is comforting to Scully and she rubs her thumb across her mother's hand in a silent thank you. Interrupting their intimate moment is the waitress, tall, brunette and pudgy, with a notepad glued in her palm.

"What can I get for ya'?" she asks them with a smile, completely oblivious to the bereft resonance surrounding the women.

"Coffee, please." says the older woman and the waitress, Alice, looks at Scully. "And you?"

She wasn't hungry but it was no surprise. Desolation supresses appeitite, filling you up with a sickly sweet bitterness that satiates normalcy. Yet it wasn't her stomach, her cells, her hunger she needed to feed. The life she needs to sustain isn't hers.

"Ugh, water, please. And a muffin-blueberry."

Even if it tastes like cardboard and makes her stomach feel more expanded than the Milky Way, she has to eat it. She has to care. For him, for them and for their baby.

The waitress jauts down the order, clicks her pen and excuses herself quickly.

"There's um, there's something else mom, that you should know."

Instantly, distress darkens Maggie Scully's gray eyes and she ducks her chin, squeezes her daughter's fingers.

"What, Dana? What is it?"

"I couldn't believe it myself, at first." Scully tells her. "I mean, I thought-I thought it was impossible, that it was more than I could have hoped for but..."

Dana stops, her eyes lost while her lips slowly curve.

Maggie studies her daughter's face, notes the bloodshot eyes and taunt cheeks, yet somehow, through the evidence of weariness, she's flushed, glowing with subtle tones of peach and rose. Maggie covers her mouth with her palm.

"Oh my God." she says breathless and Scully's smile stretches.

"I'm pregnant, mom." With this Scully laughs, not painful, or simulated but genuine.

"But how?"

Her mother asks, stunned from the knowledge of her daughter's infertility, her once barren womb. Scully shrugs and the T-shirt she stole from the closet of her child's father inches down her collar.

"I can't explain it, mom, the science of it. I only know that I am."

"Oh, honey. Oh sweetheart, I'm so happy for you."

Succumbed by her own joy, Maggie Scully rises from the table, scoots into the booth beside her daughter and captures her in a warm hug. Her mother is crying, Scully realizes, when her head is pressed into her mom's collarbone. She closes her eyes, hears plates gently clang unto the table as Alice delivers their order.

"This is so wonderful." her mother says, trailing a warm hand down Dana's arm.

Scully should be smiling, sobbing in joy, but she isn't and when she feels her mother stiffen, she clenches on the sudden wave of nausea. Maggie tugs on her daughter's chin and meets her eyes with Dana's piercing blue.

"Oh, sweetie, he doesn't know does he?"

"No." Scully whispers, her voice like glass. "I didn't find out until after he was gone."

Maggie closes her eyes, pulls her daughter into another embrace.

"I'm so sorry, Dana. I'm so happy, but I'm so sorry."

Scully dampens her mother's sleeve with a tear.

"So am I, mom. So am I."


End file.
